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Happy Friday! You know, I actually hate that saying because what about an amazing Tuesday or Wednesday that gets zero recognition?? In this week’s newsletter, I only mention my move to suburbia once, Fitbit has a new way to track your stress, Twitter has even more problems and we should all think hard about our dependence on a single cloud service. But first my big thoughts on streaming overtaking cable…
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An image of a generic cable box, jazzed up by the amazing Elena Scotti.
CREDIT: ELENA SCOTTI/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ISTOCK
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Perhaps you heard: I moved to a new house in the New Jersey suburbs. I packed my family and impressive cord collection, but I left the cable box behind.
The shocking part of that sentence for many might be that I still had a cable box. Correct: I hadn’t cut the cord…until now.
Apparently I’ve caught up to the rest of the world. For the first time, streaming services in July captured more viewers than cable or broadcast TV, according to recent data from Nielsen. (Small aside: Streaming viewership in a given month had exceeded broadcast TV before, but this is the first time it has also surpassed cable viewing.)
Ah, cable, I miss you as much as the mosquito bite on my ankle that stuck around for a week. I was thrilled to get rid of your slow and confusing interface and your partner in crime, a remote that hides its uselessness with colorful buttons.
Yet perhaps I don’t miss cable at all because it feels like I still have it. Now that I’m fully dependent on streaming, I’ve realized all that’s really changed is the pipes that bring us the content. Allow me to break it down:
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Ads everywhere.
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With no more NBC via cable, I had to watch the rest of “This is Us” on NBC’s Apple TV streaming app, where I encountered at least five ad blocks with four to five ads. (Yes, I cried, and not only because of the ads.) Netflix? Getting an ad-supported tier soon. Disney+? Same. Hulu, Peacock, Paramount Plus and HBO Max already have them.
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So many channels.
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Channels, apps, tomay-to, tomah-to. I’ve got the Netflix app to watch “Stranger Things” and a variety of shows for the kids. I’ve got Apple TV+ for “The Morning Show,” “Severance” and “Loot” (which is hilarious by the way). HBO Max for “Westworld” and “Friends” reruns. Amazon Prime Video for “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Disney+ for “Bluey” and all the other classics. How is this any different than paying for cable’s premium channels?
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💰💰💰
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I was thrilled to cut my Verizon bill from $130-something to $80-something a month. (I just get charged for high-speed internet now.) But I’m paying more than that $50 difference in streaming channels now. To be fair, I was paying for it before, but we’ve added other apps to the streaming pile, including $5 for Peacock so my wife can get her fave Bravo shows.
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Remember when streaming was going to be cheaper and better than cable?!
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Timeout, Twitter! 😗🎶
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Just when you think things couldn’t get worse for Twitter, its former head of security, Peiter Zatko, alleges there’s widespread security mismanagement at the company. In a whistleblower complaint filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, he says he uncovered extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate, “including privacy, digital and physical security, platform integrity and content moderation.” He also alleges that Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, deliberately underestimated the prevalence of spam on the platform—part of what would-be buyer Elon Musk and Twitter will debate in court in October. A Twitter spokeswoman said the whistleblower complaint “is riddled with
inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
Read the other details of the whistleblower complaint here.
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Mac DIY Repair 💻🛠️
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About a year ago, I investigated what it would take to fix a water-damaged MacBook. I found Apple wasn’t doing enough to provide repair tools and parts to users and repair shops. It subsequently launched a Self Service Repair program and this week, it expanded that to include its M1-powered MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. (It previously only included iPhones.) The company made manuals, parts and tools available through its repair store. Mac parts range from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars. To understand why this is so important, I urge you to watch my video
from last year:
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CREDIT: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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A Stress-Less Fitbit 😰
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OK, so when you hear a new Fitbit can help with stress you probably think…it gives me a Swedish massage!? It runs a hot bath and lights a scented candle!? It pours me a cup of CBD tea? Well, the $300 Sense 2 doesn’t do any of that, but it does have a cool new body-response sensor.
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Fitbit says it identifies how your body responds to stress and excitement by combining heart rate, heart-rate variability, skin temperature and electrodermal activity data with an algorithm. Just one question: Would a device telling me I’m stressed really decrease my stress level?
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📰 Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions. Sign up for What’s News, free in your inbox on weekday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
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A Thing to Try: Download Your Google Data
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN /THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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On Sunday, the New York Times published an in-depth story about how a man captured some naked photos of his toddler for medical purposes, and Google’s systems flagged his account. Ultimately, he lost access to his entire Google world. It’s a complicated story, but it’s a big lesson in our dependence on the cloud and big tech. Lose access to one service and we could lose it all—our photos, our contacts, our emails.
It’s a good reminder that there’s still a place in our lives for local data backups—or a cloud backup of a cloud backup. Google makes this relatively easy with a tool called Takeout. Visit the website, select the Google data you want to “take out” and then select your delivery method—you can choose to have a download link emailed to you or you can even have it all transferred to a Dropbox, OneDrive or Box account.
The whole process can take hours or days, depending on the amount of data you have. (I’m told I’ll receive emails with links to download my data in two days.) If your data exceeds the amount of storage on your laptop or desktop, you’ll want to buy an external hard drive so you can save it there. I recently bought this 1TB SanDisk drive.
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PHOTO: ELLEN DONKER
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Ellen Donker from Maplewood, N.J.
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Panasonic Take ‘n Tape cassette recorder
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I used it to tape songs from WABC radio back when they played a Top 10 format. The quality was horrible, but that set me on the path to later make my own mixtapes and then playlists so I could bring music on the go.
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I loved recording my friends and myself being goofy the way most kids are at that age.
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The cassette tape player no longer works, but it still looks good!
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📷 Got an idea for a throwback? Reply to this email with a photo of your old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it. 📷
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James.
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